There are no white knights

04/09/80

The My Way is crowed with burly men in heavy coats, overdressed against a mid-spring chill, anxious for the seasons to change so they can shed these and flex their muscles in an offstage strip show meant to impress dancers – who are never impressed.

I come underdressed carting a notebook and a bundle of pens I put down on the wet bar next to the beer mug Mary has waiting for me, knowing just when I usually arrive, greeting me with a smile she saves for people who aren’t constantly hitting on her or pretending to care as much about her as men do the dancers.

Most of the men overlook the barmaids in their hunt for something they can’t ever take home to their wives.

Mary doesn’t even mind my talking to the dancers, who are drawn to me for many of the same reasons, all wondering why I come here to “do my homework,” and then paw at my notebooks to see if I’ve written anything about them – when I always do.

Many tell me their deepest secret even when they do not mean to, stripping off more than their clothing when they settle into the stool beside mine to accept the drinks I buy them.

Tonight, it is a straw-blonde (the color of which comes from a bottle of bleach or bad hair dye) who settles next me, mockingly at first, and then eventually, she talks about pain.

Ultimately, they all do, pain or misery of some kind that has brought them to this place where they can bask in men’s admiration, accepting their drinks without the commitment most other barflies have to suffer through.

After all the usual preliminaries, she starts to talk about the men she’s known – and loved, and how at age 16, she fell in love with a man who beat her if she even looked at another man or another man even looked at her.

And routinely in this, she stops, frowns and asks: Why am I talking to you?"

Because I listen, I think, but do not say, and do not seek the same comfort in these women’s arms as other men do, a kick myself for it, needing such comfort as they do.

Perhaps, I simply need to hear it all, to get a glimpse of the dark world `that I tread lightly around, like a butterfly landing on the extended leaves of extremely poisonous plants, too insignificant to get sucked in easily, a daring escapade that could end with a wink or a nod, and with any mistake I might make about thinking I can survive such a plunge, regardless of how tempting it may seem.

I’m not nearly as naïve at Hank or Michael, one who thinks he can touch and not be stained by the dark forces that underlie this world, and the other, who foolishly sees the dark world as more authentic than the Madison Avenue world we live (the illusions of morality and order), and perhaps it is authentic, the way our primal brains are, and deadly, we needing the façade of society to protect us from our most primitive selves.

I know where nights like this end, and know I have to leave soon, break away from this flower before I get sucked into where the nectar and the poison reside, waiting only for the moment when she must climb back onto the stage to dance.

I don't want to reach that point where she might ask me to come home with her the way some other dancers have, knowing that no such invitation comes without a cost. I don’t want to have to fumble around until I come up with a socially acceptable way to say, “no.” I don’t want to turn into another abuser, a vicious bee dipping into the deepest part of her only to flirt away covered with her essence and leaving her empty and bitter at yet another man.

Like others before her, she touched by pad and ponders what it is I find so interesting in this world to write about, and why I don’t ever let anyone read it, and why I won’t let her read it now.

I cannot give her a reason, knowing that each word I write here amounts to a confession, me as guilty as any other man in this place, my head filled with the same dreadful drama.

Then, she goes and mounts the stage, pouting as I pay for my beer and turn to leave, her eyes full of promises I don't want her to keep.

"How often do you come here?" she asks as the owner shouts for her to dance.

"About once a week," I say and take up my note books, and turn to leave, feeling sorry for her, but knowing, too, I am not the answer, just an example of what is possible beyond this place and this life, one of many men who don't immediately want to fuck her. Deep down, through all the horniness and guilt, I want to be kind and loving, even though I don't always achieve that goal.

I feel sorry for her use of drugs which she said she needs to shoot to help her erase the memory of the men.

"One man is as good as any other," She whispers, her hard eyes saying she means every word.

Why does she continue this if she hates these men so much, these worst of men, truly flawed men, the men who breathe violence and hate as part of their everyday lives?

She lives in a self-created jail cell she can’t easily walk away from, in love with the attention these men give, if not with the men, each of them a prison bar or a jail guard that keeps her contained. She cannot survive in the Madison Avenue world where we live with other illusions, with pretenses of morality that do not exist here. Perhaps, Michael is right. Perhaps we come closest to the essence of who we are in places like this.

And yet, this girl like most of those I talk to here, holds out the illusion of a different kind, that somehow out of this pit of pestilence a white knight will rise up to rescue her, and each girl like her growing more and more bitter when each one turns out to be an empty suit of armor.

I see this hope in this girl’s eyes as she mounts the stage and smiles back down at me at the bar, the flash of armor reflected there, when I am no more one than any of the other men around me.

There are no white Knights, no one to rebuild her.

She has to do that for herself, only she can’t do it here, in a dark world full of demons and death traps, where foundations of any castle she builds are constructed on ill will and despair built by and designed to appease desperate men.

Filmore George is dead

Sept. 7, 1971

Louise got the call from New York yesterday, and learned George was dead.

We knew he worked for the Filmore as a bouncer but died out in Central Park at some rock concert where he’d been hired freelance.

He was only 22 yet seemed older in my memory from late last year and earlier this year when we lived up the street and later downstairs from him on East Sixth Street.

“He was working a concert for The Who,” his wife told Louise, her voice lost to emotion or perhaps to the uncertain circuitry of long distance. She loved him, but not so much as to be shattered at his demise. He had been in fights before at the Filmore and had even been stabbed once or twice.

The dispute came as result of someone screaming about not being able to get into the concert and when George went to escort him away, the guy stabbed him, said Caroline, his wife, girlfriend or whatever, we never knew.

George – who the paper said was George Byington (not a name we knew him by) apparently had been taking up these gigs since the Filmore closed earlier this year. His wife had called to Louise to tell her about his working The Mother’s concert at the Filmore before the doors closed for the last time.

We knew him as George Ethridge and he lived at 422 East Sixth Street for a few months prior to our return to New York last year on Labor Day. He supposedly lived in Florida before that, although he told us at the time, he was raised in upstate New York.

This was sad news, if not surprising and for me was the last contact with Filmore's greatness fading into an attack of broken bottles and knives – although George was that kind of man though that was likely to get stabbed.

He had a suppressed rage that he someone overcame with a diehard dedication to The Doors and The Dead.

George was thrilled to be a part time a bouncer at the Fillmore East.

He wore his hair in a white man's afro, blonde hair frizzed out like Garfunkel's and he had thick blond mustache, which showed the trail of drugs that he used -- his nose the main entrance to his body for almost anything he could consume.

I was always struck about him and his chosen profession, since he seemed too small for the part.  He was skinny and short, about five foot six with bones that look like they would break once they got a good grip on him.

His face was pot marked with the scars any reference of a bad case of teenage pimples, although at 22, those problems were only memories. The scar down his right cheek was a memory to another attempt of someone stabbing him which he survived and was extremely proud of.

When he was relaxed, he often would sit with his hands clamping and unclamping unconsciously. Whenever someone noticed this and mentioned it to him, he denied it as if it was something terrible to admit it.

His house was always ready for a party with the beer in the refrigerator a bong by the fireplace and dope stashed in various different locations about the house.

Caroline was always scared that the police would come, and they would not be able to find all the dope in time to flush it.

He thought this fear absurd and he told her as much.

He lived on the second floor of the second East Sixth Street tenement while we occupied one apartment on the first floor.

He had inherited the apartment through a string of girl and boy friends.

He had the whole floor of what was called a rail road style apartment and somehow managed to acquire the rail road apartment across the hall. So, he actually controlled all four doors that looked out onto the hallway – although only permitted people to come and go by one of the two doors at the rear of the hall, the one near the head of the stairs coming up from the street. This allowed him or one of his minions to look out through the door on the opposite side of the hall to see just who was knocking and if it was the police. He had an escape plan that included letting the cops in that door while everybody else fled out the other and down to the street.

A person could circle the whole floor from one room to another without actually stepping out into the hall.

George sometimes called it “the hive,” though this described the situation as well, such as the remarkable collection of people, men and women, who started out as lovers and he hung on to in some perverse sense of an extended family. Each person adopted a corner of the vast space and then adapted it to their own personal turf.

One person had racks and racks of silk screen equipment stacked in his corner, and shelves stuffed with t-shirts and other items he peddles to local merchants or in bulk or on consignment.

In another corner, a woman made candles, drips of hot wax clinging to her usually bare breasts as she dipped the wick into a bubbling caldron against and again, smiling at me and others who passed.

Many of the corners of this vast apartment housed musicians, guitars, drums and less rock and roll oriented instruments scattered along the walls or in closets.

But the Hive held a fair share of painters and photographers as well, though these last apparently dedicated their lives and craft to capture images of one subject: The Grateful Dead.

In fact, George’s passion for the San Francisco-based band seemed to be the one and only criteria for living in the Hive. Anyone who expressed interest in the band was welcome to say.

George’s space included a horse-shoe shaped couch, a fire place into which George had installed a stereo.

Grateful Dead album covers leaned against the leg of a table, along with the covers of other legendary San Francisco bands from the period George called “the classic period” by which he meant 1963 to 1966.

He also had a few albums by LA bands such as “The Doors” and “Buffalo Springfield.”

But nowhere in the apartment could you find a record by more commercial bands such as “The Beatles” or “The Stones.”

George did, however, have a number of band posters, mostly billboard advertisements from Grateful Dead appearances at the Filmore East where he worked.

George was one of the few people I knew who actually had a telephone. This was kept in a small table in remote corner of the vast apartment, with George acknowledging the need for an occasional contact with the outside world. He tried his best to discourage this, of course, and he monitored those who used it, keeping in that section of the apartment he considered his.

George was born upstate New York; his father was a politician for a time then retired to some sort of law firm in Albany and George despised him.

His mother was an ex-Miss New York who came twice a month to see George bringing him that extra bit of cash that she managed to sneak around his father these days usually came around the 1st and the 15th and were marked on the calendar with a large red M.

There were no parties on these two days or the days before them either. Those were the days when the apartment was cleaned, and the dope stashed.

The party's came after mother left and these usually were marathon events which brought most of the block dealers down. Many saw George as a little god, someone who got them into the Fillmore got them to meet the stars, got them good dope. He was a fun guy.

Caroline – girlfriend or wife – loved and hated him and cheated on him often, and especially with people close to him. He didn't seem to mind as long as she stayed with him in the end.

George invited me up to his apartment frequently. This was one of those mysterious attractions that I never quite understood. He seemed to trust me when he rarely trusted anybody else. Maybe because Louise was pregnant at the time, he figured we didn’t pose a threat.

As with his other friends, Louise and I were expected to think of him as cool.

Louise and I were naive enough to believe this, even though in some ways he was just a grouchy young man strung out and lonely, who surrounded himself with a lot of lost people; so, he felt less lost than he was. We were all lost souls on a ship lost at sea, knowing that the ship was slowly sinking and the whole effort to keep it afloat was pointless.

But George loved the short walk up East Sixth Street to his job at the Filmore.

Caroline loved the strange sexual scene they had created.

George and Caroline made up the inner core of The Hive, with Bob and Mary, a foursome that was supposed to be exploring sexual extremes, overseen by George, but manipulated by Caroline.

Bob was a strange fish in this world because he looked so normal, more like a Madison Avenue executive than a freak, although he and Mary were even more naïve than Louise and me or any of George’s other followers.

Mary was Caroline's best friend from Atlanta, Georgia and brought Bob with her at Carolyn's invitation.

Bob was a dirty blond hair Southern boy with more of a taste for whiskey than pot but grew slowly more familiar with George is kind of high. Mary was a black-haired beauty, always made up with shimmering red lips.  Carolyn had a beauty, too, but hers was quieter. She was a small woman who wore her brown hair in pigtails and who dressed in sandals and leather Native America Indian dresses.  There were many artifacts both authentic and imitation scattered about the apartment many of the rugs and pictures had Indian scenes in them.

Mary dislike this tendency in Caroline's. She like things modern. she liked wearing tight silk and leather pants. She liked hard rock music.

Bob was like Carolyn and agreed with her often which was the cause of many of his problems with his wife. Mary's favorite fantasy and one that she engaged in often was partner switching.

The problem is George never cooperated. George would often rather sit back and watch another man make love to his wife then participate actively with another woman. Many times, Mary enlisted other men letting her own husband make love to Carolyn.

These sessions, of course, were close to the general party crowd.

We knew about them only because Mary more than once tried to enlist me as the fourth party – and I was always tempted because when pregnant Louise did not want to have sex even though I did. I kept these invitations secret from her because Louise liked Mary and I didn’t want that to change.

But it wasn’t for any noble reason that I kept out of the fray. George and his world scared me, and I had the ugly feeling that I could get sucked into something without knowing it and see my world spin out of control.

Now, 3,000 miles away in Portland, Oregon, I wonder what will become of The Hive and the crowd now that George is dead.

Those who came before

February 12, 1977

“You feel like a cad when you marry them off,” Billy says, lifting the beer mug to his mouth so that the words echo slightly as he speaks, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed guy of thirty-something still young enough-looking to get almost any woman he wants and usually does, even some of the women who come in here to pick up one of the musicians, though tonight, he seems nostalgic, coming from somebody’s wedding I think must be his sister’s or some cousin, but turns out to be his ex-girlfriend.

“I go to them all,” he says, laughing, beer foam clinging to his upper lip until he wipes it away with a bar napkin, then sighs. “I know it sounds weird – and it is weird, especially for the groom who wonders what I’m doing there, and what my ex must be thinking to invite me – they always do. Maybe they remember how it was when we were together, how well we fit, how good I was with them – I remember everyone, and how different they all were, each one having a special place in my heart. The grooms always wonder if I’m better than them, and if my showing up at their wedding is a kind of taunt or threat, my ex telling them by inviting me that they’d better hold up their end or I’ll come back.”

He takes another long swig, then laughs again.

“I never go back,” he says. “One taste is all I need, even if that taste lasts a while. Once I move on, I move on, looking for something else, someone else, something special I could not find before. I go because I need to see the ones I had move on, find happiness they could not find with me, and get a kick seeing their faces framed by lace, their gazes still just innocent enough to believe in their hearts they are still virgins, or as close as any of us get these days, unviolated by anyone even me, though I always do my best to violate everyone of them in every way possible, and somehow still want more.”

He finishes his beer and thumps the mug back down on the bar, but shakes his head at Tommy, the bartender, when Tommy askes with a look if he wants another.

Billy usually only has two, but tonight has already had three, yet seems drunk in a way I’ve not seen him drunk before.

“The funny part, of course,” he says finally, “is how many others like her are lined up in the pews, women I’ve known before or after or even at a time when I was still with her, all of them clinging to the arms of men they have married or intend to marry, sneaking looks at me at the back wondering if I’ve noticed or remembered being at their wedding or when they got introduced to the men they’re with, some of whom I introduced to them – not exactly to get rid of them, not exactly telling them I’m moving on. It’s more like I want them to be happy, in a way I can never be.”

Easter on Broadway

April 6, 1980

I sit on a park bench facing downtown in the middle of the island on Broadway, dawn spreading its pink fingers down West 62nd Street threatening to expose me.
Easter is not a good holiday for me, although my grandfather once claimed the birth of my uncle, Frank, on Easter 1938 was a sign his luck was about to change – the family then mired in the midst of the Great Depression, having moved out of houses my grandfather and his brother could not sell, into the backroom of his mother’s house where he had to take up duties at the eldest son again.
My ex-wife spent our last Easter together in a hospital room, suffering both from some imaginary illness and the scandal of having been cheating on me and the dread of getting caught.
Most Easters I spent as a kid came with chocolate and marshmallow bunnies, but little faith.
I have less faith now, waiting for the band finish in the Mud Club, lip-syncing a song they recorded with Joey Ramone earlier this year downtown, with the crew from 20/20 TV helping them make a video so they can get an agent and maybe make it big before we all get too old, and fat, and lazy.
I don’t want to be a witness to the crime and so, decided not to indulge in the white powder everybody needs to get through the ritual, and come out here and sip an already cold coffee, feeling out of touch, feeling lonely, needing something more than rock and roll to sustain me, watching the pigeons pecking between the sidewalk cracks for their holy Sunday feast.
On the ground floor of a nearby building, the American Bible Society displays its Easter message telling us all of hope and salvation, which I do not feel, though the tranquility of the early morning seems oddly abstract, as if I no longer occupy the same planet I did, transported not across a river via The George Washington Bridge, but to some alien landscape where the homeless get revealed one by one as the sunlight fills up each deep doorway where they sleep, ignored by the wealthy pedestrians of the most liberal piece of planet, and the rumble of cars and cabs rolling up the street, many carrying the sedated remains of club-goers like those we displaced with our movie-making equipment.
Everybody is a star, my co-workers with the band tell me, buoyed by too long lines off short tables in the backroom. Club management treating us as the interlopers from New Jersey we are, as we steered our gear over the crimson carpet the previous patrons puked on before our arrival, and over the scuffed wooden dance floor dripping red from spilled drinks that looks like blood, our wheels leaving a more of a mark on that world than our music or video ever well.
I am too tired to care.
Their mark is no my mark, and so I sit here taking in the sun, just another bum far from home, catching a glimpse of the bass player and his girlfriend squinting at me from the door of the club, wondering about me and why I’m not with them, and why I seem to remote, unable to take part in this ritual of death, dying and desperate rebirth
Some black guy with thick wrap-around shades pauses to grin at me and then gives me the thumbs up and wishes me a Happy Easter.
I nod back, and feel the beams of sunlight warming my face, hearing the coo of the pigeons around me, and the moan of traffic going on with a life that has nothing to do with what does on in the club, something real, something that I miss from those days when I once lived here. I smell the soft scent of the Hudson River mingling with the fumes of traffic. It is a sweet perfume, something real, something that needs no one to explain, leaving a permanent mark on my soul I can never explain.

Drowning in the North Atlantic

March 22, 1998

If I squint the water looks like a wall of clay I used to play with in Kindergarten, always fooled by how smooth and cool in looked in the metal tube Mrs. Grady gave us, even the smell is the same, stirred up, like cookie dough, though when here I always think of the salt water taffy I annoyed my uncles to buy me until they did, and taste its sweet and salty flavor with each breath I breath, and feel the moist air like the taffy or clay against my tongue – “don’t eat that!” Mrs. Grady yelling, although I always did, always needing to taste everything as if I could make no sense of the world unless through my mouth, my lips gatekeeper so my young universe I would later come to appreciate.

“Spit it out!”

And I did that, too, wet dough thumping onto the desk in front of me, and that too, looking like the sea, now, gray, with a gray sky, as if waiting for me to press against it some newsprint comic strip to give it shape, or to mold it between my fingers, stroking out each lump until something new thing emerged.

I leave my fingerprints, greasy, smeared and chaotic on every experience, like a criminal who insists on getting caught for the crimes I otherwise need to hire, taking blame for each new creation, as if I intended to make what ultimately came out, dragging home then and now something to hang on the door of the refrigerator, not quite art – hoping someone will love it anyway.

When the sun shifts, I see this wall of water like the color of glass bricks, hazy and gray, like an off color tooth I try to disguise, or that odd piece of mis-colored slate of the old style sidewalks in front of my house, murky water that doesn’t even reflect the shapes of the people who stand at the foot of each incoming wave, the sweaty women with thick clothing against this still-cool season, water and people looking like the dust that gets caught in slashes of sunlight through the front windows of my old house. I keep waiting for the wind to gust to make water and people dance, but none do.

Where the sunlight shows far out from shore, the water gleams with a smooth and dirty green like cross of jade I found in a back street shop in LA’s little Chinatown, bought for my girlfriend, broken during some dispute, the pieces scattered and later reclaimed from some gutter where some thug threw them as away as worthless, later inspiration for this piece of sea I stand staring out at, like the last healthy part in a dying body too critical to recover.

And here I am, drowning in the North Atlantic, smeared with the pale colors of painful memories, seeing the shattered pieces of my own reflection on each incoming way. I can no longer breathe under the weight of the water; I cannot feel the bottom with the tips of my toes, only the jagged edges of stone that stick up from the bottle, slick sea shells nobody sells near the shore, tied to this illusion by stringy, slimy seaweed I can not until, bound to a vision I cannot close my eyes against, waiting for the sirens’ song, catching whiffs of some older more pleasant life I used to have hear – the fried peppers and sausage, the burned French fries, the overcooked pizza with brown crust – lost, lingering on the tip of my tongue like a word half forgotten, too frail for anyone to toss out as a life rope, as I slowly sink deep into the pale colors of my past.

A Different Flame?

 04-05-80

We sit here, two patrons of the arts, dueling with stares, sad companions, clinging to Bleeker and MacDougal in a low-light café, lacking only the Beatnik berets and snapping figures to demonstrate our appreciation – forty years out of date, after the Beats have died, and the Beatles, and punk music, long hair and goatees giving away to nose rings and purple or green or even chartreuse hair.

But the essence hasn’t changed, the lovers still meet here, embracing each other and the shadows, their sweet lies serving them as poetry nobody need appreciate but each other.

We, two, different from the dark shapes, friends, not lovers (a sad fact I hate to admit), seeking some ultimate truth here the way others before us have, we following some other light in this dark cave in which we live, resisting the urges and the passions that have haunted us our whole lives, struggling to keep from singing figures or toes or worse in the fires that burn all too near us and in us, me staring too closely at the shape of you, the twist and glitter of your lips, the glint of something familiar in your eyes, the steady way you click your red finger nails on the scarred table top between us, impatient, urgent, insistent, a Morris Code with a message I struggle to resist, we supposedly above that, when in such low light we tempt fate, knowing that out of the embers of this something might grow and overthrow us.

I ache to feel something more, some more inspired light, some intellectual connection that would illuminate our minds, while not setting ourselves to flame in a passion rivaling Sherman’s march to the sea, knowing that once started, I cannot stop, and in the wake all reason is abandoned, and excuses set to torch.

I ache to be someone other than the man I used to be, the eyes that stare at the passing scenery, the passionate embrace I could never resist, the glitter of some look at the turns every face into the pursuit of gold – that flat earth man willing to leap off the edge of the world in my need, no fountain of youth, no secret cities, and yet I know I have not changed as much as I pretend, still looking over this table top, still thinking all I have always thought, my poetry twisting up inside of me, building up as fuel for a blaze I know once lit, I can never control – and do not want to.

These Days

04/02/80 I clutch this time in my life to my chest like a kid clutches candy, saving it for some as yet unimaginable future for a moment when I might need inspiration, looking back for encouragement the way other people recollect high school.For some reason, this period seems perfect, lacking the sense of blue-collar slavery I endured for most of the last decade.I sit here, on these still-cool concrete steps of the student center, pondering the people who pass, the coming and going on them, their chatter filling this arched doorway with incomprehensible echoes, people hurrying by with some urgent and important deed they need to accomplish, a decade too inexperienced to understand what they face before they reach my age, an then, missing out on some of the details that make their lives seem to special – few contemned to face a time clock or the bent back of hard labor the way I did in my alternative journey here.One woman – perhaps no older than 19 – complains about her social life, yapping at her girlfriend poodle-like, each bark thick with invectives over some boy she met in sociology.Behind her, coming from the direction of the campus library wears a grin so stupid I know immediately he is in love, his expression too vacant for him to notice any of the other pretty women moving in and out the supermarket doors that lead into and out of the student center, leaving me to wonder how either boy or girl will ever see their issues revolved, or what might become of them, or where they might be in a decade or two, and if I will ever encounter them again at some distant location in some other circumstance.I am self-consumed, banking my current reality, absorbing an investment of images that I might call upon later, jotting each brief glimpse into other people’s lives in notebooks I will consult later – a snap shot of unresolved lives that I capture only at a moment after which I lose track, and have no future snapshot to compare again – the blonde hair turning gray, the smooth face taking on wrinkles, the hopeful look satisfied or filled with despair.
Some of these people I see over and over again each time I sit here; some I even know from classes we take together or events we attend – and yet know even these are temporary, faces I think I know, but may never know again, lives through which I momentarily pass, and may not pass through again, or may hear about or glimpse at a distance as they find fame I never find, or collect fortunes to which their educations provide a key.Even the most familiar I do not know well; I have no names for them, an paint them today with the emotions I see in passing, the sad men, the happy women, the man drinking can of beer near the stair that wraps around the ramp along the windows of the student center store, or the other man, leading against the wall – staring at all the women’s chests as they pass.Two lovers nestle in the corner of the building, giggling, teasing each other with pecking kissed, she pressing the tips of her fingers against his lips to make him stop, both giggling, both falling silent, both a mystery to me as to if this might ever last.I collect them all in them all between the covers of this notebook, filling up empty pages with fragments of lives I may never encounter again. 

Glass Fish

04/01/80

River water flaps sluggishly against the post, a rare, clean, see-through water in one of the country’s most polluted rivers, glistening with sunlight as if each thing it touches is covered in jewels.

The aftermath of last night’s storm stirred up the sand, pushing and pulling soil from either side as to leave streaks across the surface so that from the distance of the bridge over which I come, it looks like the petals of a large daisy.

This has become my river as it was my family’s before me, and I have possessed by its moods, riled by its rising tides, and comforted by their decline, so that the river and I have calmed from each of our respective storms overnight.

This old river suffering from the abuse of time, the old mills pouring poison into it until too dangerous to touch, while I sometimes poison myself, filling myself with rage that I have no more outlet for than the river does, and so, we both must bear our poisons until we reach some unsuspecting victim downstream, the innocent bystander to some crime they have no part in, though in fact my crime is far worse than the river’s, since I misused my gifts to hurt my poetry, serving as a weapon, each word a bullet aimed as some person’s heart – and not for the first time.

Perhaps, we – this river and I – have no other way to express ourselves except to let flow what is inside of us, and so, unable to speak in any other ways, we speak in the only way we can, this river overflowing its banks during high-tide storms such as last night, while I scribble out poetry that I hand to some poor barfly who mistakenly believes I loved her, when I do not.

And in handing her this word-polluted paper, I led her mistakenly to believe the poem professed love instead of outrage, and then I bore witness to her wilting in the same way the river does each thing its polluted water touches, her face growing pale just as the dying fireweed does at high tide as she read my hateful gift.

She deserves better, even if I do not care for her in the way she expects, and I should know better, needing a lesson in how to avoid hurting people who are innocent of anything except false expectation.

I live with the illusion of truth being something pure, and decent, when down deep I suspect its cold touch does as much harm as it does good, and that somehow, we who wield it for our own purposes must make the judgement as to when and where and at whom to release it, to hold it back when professing it produces only pain.

I excuse myself by being swept up in the storm, being divorced from the original cause, Kathy’s attempt to kill herself, not over me or my poem, but over men who have used and abused her, pushing her from one shore to another so that she could not tell to which side of the river she was supposed to go, a typical situation as school where upper-classmen and professors often take advantage of the awed-innocence of people like her, and in my presumption of comfort, I write words that seem like love but are not love, and then, to rescue her from this misconception, I toss another poem, one weighed down with lead rather than feathers, and she goes down again – perhaps for the third time.

She claims my first poem saved her life; clearly the second one did just the reverse.

I keep thinking of the old oriental proverb, the one which says that if you save a life, you are responsible for it.

Yet, too many times of late my kindness has been mistaken for affection, and my caring mistaken for love. This is a fragile world with glass fish swimming. And though I can see their struggle, I cannot see mine. They seem transparent and without substance, while I see myself as firm.

 Perhaps I am the one who is transparent and not them, making my noble search for truth less viable.

 Perhaps, standing here beside the river, I only think I see the bottom, when I do not.

Terms of Entrapment

03/28/80

She comes in again tonight, to sit and to stare at me, drumming her fingers on the table – the tap, tap, tap of sharp red nails – pretending I am unimportant to her.

Her long blonde hair and bright red lipstick ought to make her stand out against the dark backdrop of the bar, but does not since there are some many other blondes with red lipstick and finger nails, the current uniform for barflies these days – though almost every guy behind every beer mug still stares at her and the others, hopeful as they all are to draw her attention, then looking elsewhere when she ignores them, too.

She’s here looking for something more than the one-night-stand other women come here for, or pretend to anyway, and thinks I’m the one who will give her what she wants, when I’ve told her over and over, I’m not in love with her – she just doesn’t believe it.

I don’t even belong in this world where people pour out their souls as fast as Tommy, the bartender, does their drinks – men more than women, but sometimes women like her, looking for something from someone that I certainly can’t give – an illusion of house and home and family that isn’t possible coming from a place like this or from a person like me.

Each time she comes in, I tell her the same thing, only less and less gently until I feel guilty hearing the cold note in my own voice, and still, she persists, following the bad as if she another groupie from bar to bar, only never looking at the lead singer the way all the other groupies, too, and when I’m not with the band, calling me at home, or when I refuse to answer, leaving notes under the windshield wiper of my car the way as cop might leave a traffic ticket.

Tonight, I make up my mind to end this, knowing that she will never give up and won’t accept even my cool kindness; she won’t settle for anything less than love.

So, I walk up to her table, stared down into her face and tell her, "Go away."

I watch the hurt ripple across her face as if she is a pool of water into which I have just thrown a heavy stone.

It is a deeper hurt than I intend, but I don’t know any other way to stop this, she believing I have led her on when I have done everything possible not to.

She, like some others I’ve seen here, fishes the water, using sex as bait, hoping to plant a hook in a man – though most not looking for marriage, but for something else most men want to avoid.

Her hurt turns immediately into rage as she stares straight into my eyes and growls about my ego, and how mistaken I am, and I say nothing, too stunned to speak, wondering just what new angle she is coming at me with.

I just walk away.

She never stops staring. Yet is no longer love-struck, and her doe-like gaze, gone, her eyes full of fire and rage.

I ache to make it up to her, to try and explain, and to make her understand I’m not looking for love, at least not yet, and certainly not here, and that I live alone because I like it that way, and still licking my wounds over some old romance I still feel deep inside of me, and cannot let go of even though it let go of me a long, long time ago, and how I’m not yet ready to let myself fall back into a trap I know if I fall into I might never again escape.

Vampires

3-27-80

He grumbles about the women he sees at the bar while he sucks on a bottle of Budweiser, a dark man with streaks of early gray in his hair and beard, although he’s no older than we are, calling each woman who walks in “a vampire,” while claiming they only come here to suck men’s blood.

Nobody takes him, too seriously except maybe for the newcomer-younger women who keep asking Tommy, the bartender, why he lets this guy stick around.

Tommy never has a good answer, except to mumble something about “local color,” by which he means, this guy, we call “Aqualung” (after the 1970s Jethro Tull hit) is one of the handful of regulars that keep the bar in business in-between during those slow times weekdays when the bar doesn’t have a rock and roll band to draw customers.

“He keeps me honest,” Tommy says, confusing all but those of us who have heard Aqualung’s ranting for some time, hearing about his time in Vietnam, and how things never quite seemed real when he got back to the states, how he lost his wife to some “goddamn hippie,” and how he could never get back his career after the Army ruined him with the draft.

We don’t feel sorry for him nearly as much as he feels sorry for himself, we just breathe deep and down our drinks, feeling how much luckier we are for having escape, and examining ourselves just a little closer as to why we had, some of us seeing ourselves as one of those “goddamn hippies” that lucked out and wound up with some GI’s girl, and feeling guilty, each of us at some point during the night, buy the poor fool a drink.

         

Okay, I'm a bum

3/30/80

 I've done everything and said everything to discourage her, but still she follows me.

 So now I've taken up residence in a closet with the broom handle jabbing me, and the smell of ammonia so overwhelming I can hardly breathe, only occasionally cracking the door to peer out.

 I am safe only for the moment, however, and feel more than a little foolish, especially when I think of what the band will say when they found out I ran away from my one and only personal groupie.

 But one look into those ever-loving watery eyes of hers and my stomach turns, and I shuddered in the back of the closet, wishing management had thought to put bolts on the inside of the door instead of the outside.

 At nearly 29, I'm too old for this, fearing to she will show up at every performance, peeved when those fears are realized.

 Tonight, it started the moment she walked through the front door and yelled my name. I barely had time to escape to the men's room and was forced to drag my bag of notebooks with me. Even then, it was a brief reprieve, me spending as long as I could leaning against the wall near the urinal before dark looks of the bar staff drove me outside again.

 And there she was, blonde head bobbing up and down like an excited dog's, all smiles and kisses I could not dodge, and then, managed to pull her off me with the excuse I had work to do. And thus, I made my way to the band's dressing room, where I could take comfort behind the door, knowing she could not make her way in immediately. Finally, I pulled the drum cases out from the wall a little and laid down on the floor behind them, figuring I could out last her with sleep, and would have stayed like that had not the band's volume performing begun to send down a shower of plaster on my head.

 Thirst drove me from the room again, and I caught the guitarist just finishing the first set and begged him for rescue.

 "You have to take her off my hands," I pleaded.

 He only laughed. "She'll do you some good," he said and made his way to the men's room to pee.

 The bass player was equally unsympathetic. "She'll get sick of you after a few days, they all do."

 "But it's been four weeks so far," I said.

 "Oh, well," the bass player said. "Then maybe she really does love you."

 The drummer had no comment and didn't even wish me luck.

 So, I took to the closet and here, and just now, I heard something in the hall, something like the click of heals stopping just outside.

 "Hello?" she says. "Are you in there."

 "I'm busy," I say.

 "I need your help."

 "What?"

 "With my boyfriend."

 "I didn't know you had a boyfriend from the way you've been acting."

 "Of course, I have a boyfriend," she says. "And he thinks I've been cheating on him, and says he's going to beat up whoever it is. I thought I ought to warn you."

 Then she goes away.

 "Thanks a lot!" I shout, wondering just how big a brute her boyfriend is.

The curse

 03/26/80  Go-go girls don't usually sit by themselves at the bar, but tonight this one does, ignoring the requests for attention the men make with their lusting eyes, waving off the drinks they send her way with a wave of her hand. She had the bar owner fuming -- a man who makes his money by the number of drinks men buy, for themselves and for her -- but she ignores him, too, apparently having too much else on her mind. Most dancers are full of stories or dope or both, deluding themselves with lies about having some place better to go when they are through here, this always as the interim step to someplace else, a step that seems to last forever, or goes somewhere they'd not expected. This town is full of prostitutes who once thought they would make it as other things, as legitimate dancers, as legitimate actors, looking to Broadway, TV or Hollywood for their salvation. I've listened to their tales night after night. One woman a few months back told me an elaborate tale about how she should have been on Broadway and would have been had her agent done his job, and then laughed uproariously when ... after she asked what I was doing with pad and pen ... I said I was a writer. It is all a put on here, each wearing a mask indicating some other level of importance, because if this is all these women have, they would go crazy. But this one tonight, stares at her drink and her thin-fingered hands and seems to sense the truth. She is not drunk, she is not high, she is only aware, and that is the problem. Down here, sometimes awareness is a curse.